Week 11

And so we've come to week 11, to the spring season, and to your final day in the literature course.  I hope you have enjoyed the readings.  There were many we did not get time to address, but they remain for your leisure.  You can access the links here indefinitely, that is until such time as I take the site down.  

     Some themes to think about as you write the in-class essay (posted last week):  

Authority/Society and the Individual:  how authority is defined, how founded and invested, its impacts and relations to those figures and institutions that commonly wield it and/or are affected by it,  parents, teachers, police, the citizen, the child or youth, what have you–all the institutions and people and cultural activities in our society that claim and command our attention by weight of authority ( as distinguished from mere power or physical force).  In literature, the author creates or writes and the story that is told may be in fiction or non-fiction form, in poetry or prose, but its truths such as they are tell us something,  shape our understanding of what it means to be human and to exist in a world that is palpable and real, but ever-changing and always beyond us in so many ways. 

The Natural World:  the womb of all life, Nature is the alpha and omega, and whatever face Nature wears, for good or ill, our fates are linked inextricably.  Whether the world ( and we ourselves) appears as it does in accordance with some divine plan or design or Fate, whether what science calls natural selection and chance events are an aspect of that, whether the mythic stories of creation, lost paradises and first peoples are "true", certainly the world is unfolding and we along with it, witness to, and participant in the show.

Art:  the made world, constructed from the material elements of the world and human imagination and ingenuity and energy and will and the desire to control and shape the experience we are thrown into at birth, and from which only death will deliver us, ultimately.  What does it all mean?  What pleasures, what pains, what needs? To these art address itself.

Love:  What connects us to this world, to this life we are given, however briefly, and what does it ask of us along the way? What is the power and authority that love exerts? What will we do, for good or ill, for its sake or at its promptings?

Year’s End                                        by Richard Wilbur (b.1921)

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show   

A gathered light, a    atmosphere,   

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   

And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   

And held in ice as dancers in a spell   

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   

Composedly have made their long sojourns,   

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise   

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze   

The random hands, the loose unready eyes   

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause   

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

The poet Richard Wilbur, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and one time Poet Laureate, said the following:  “What poetry does with ideas is to redeem them from abstraction and submerge them in sensibility.”  Poetry makes us feel, brings our senses into the moment or view described (as does prose, I might add) Moreover he wants his students to memorize poetry: 

“The kind of poetry I like best, and try to write, uses the whole instrument,” he says. “Meter, rhyme, musical expression—and everything is done for the sake of what’s being said, not for the sake of prettiness.” At the same time, he believes that “For anyone who knows how to use these forms powerfully, they make for a stronger kind of poetry than free verse can ever be.”

“All these traditional means are ways of being rhythmically clear,” he explains: “making the emphases strong, making it clear what words are important. Rhyme is not just making a jingling noise, but telling what words deserve emphasis. Meter, too, tells what the rhythm of thought is. It doesn’t necessarily sound like music, but it has the strength of sound underlying everything being said. I encourage my students to memorize poems. If a poem is good, it is well to say it again and again in your mind until you’ve found all the intended tones and emphases.” He adds, “One of the great fascinations of poetry is that you’re going almost naked: the equipment is so small, just language.”

Good luck on your recitations and paperwork.  It was a pleasure having you all in class!

Week 10

(for Next Week:)

                                                                Allen Ginsberg

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
       – Polonius to Laertes in Hamlet

   Howl is a poem by Allen Ginsberg, first published in 1957, and Howl is, also, more recently, a film, directed by Bob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, about the poet and his work.  One of its source inspirations,  (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174745) "Song of Myself", by Walt Whitman, invites stylisic and thematic comparison as autobiographical free verse poem written in long lines, many including catalog elements, and a narrator intent on laying bare the cultural and natural, physical experience of being human, and of exploring/celebrating the sexual dimension of our lives and the diverse quality of human identity. The poet's uninhibited, challenging voice is central to both, and both draw attention to the importance of authentic self-expression and relationships built on candor and openness. 


In the film Howl, James Franco portrays the poet Allen Ginsberg, whose life and work illustrates the tensions of mid-century America, between the haves and have not, between conservative elites and the disaffected, educated and uneducated alike, searching for more transparency and candidness in national life, more tolerance and compassion, amid an increasingly corporatized and militarized order that proved an obstacle to simple human happiness.  Ginsberg, like Walt Whitman, and like many black writers of the Harlem Renaissance and after, wrote of and for a more democratic, open, peaceful America.

 Having you watch the film Howl (starring James Franco in the role of the poet Allen Ginsberg, author of the poem “Howl”) I will be interested in your response to the content of the poem and the film, the poet’s explanations of his work and why he wrote it, and the critical responses expressed during the trial scenes.  If you owe a short response, or want to focus on Howl as a final project:  In your own words, relate what the poem is about, what you thought of Ginsberg’s discussion of the work, and the opinions aired in court on the matter of its obscenity or no, its artistic merit, the advisability of censoring its publication, etcetera (350 words, short response).

Several links posted here may be useful:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/life_and_art/2010/09/how_howl_changed_the_world.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2006/04/the_paradox_of_howl.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2010/09/howl.html

http://www.shmoop.com/howl/section-1-lines-6-10-summary.html

http://www.dhs.fjanosco.net/Documents/HowlOnTrial.pdf
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A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997)

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

  In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

  What peaches and what penumbras!  Whole families shopping at night!  Aisles full of husbands!  Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

  I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

  I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?  What price bananas?  Are you my Angel?

  I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

  We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

  Where are we going, Walt Whitman?  The doors close in a hour.  Which way does your beard point tonight?

  (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)

  Will we walk all night through solitary streets?  The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.

  Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

  Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

--Berkeley, 1955

                                                                  "Icarus"  –by Henri Matisse

Week 9

                                                   Stonehenge (built circa 3000 B.C.)

The Shadow on the Stone           by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

I went by the Druid stone

That broods in the garden white and lone,

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows

That at some moments fall thereon

From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,

And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders

Threw there when she was gardening.

I thought her behind my back,

Yea, her I long had learned to lack,

And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,

Though how do you get into this old track?’

And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf

As a sad response; and to keep down grief

I would not turn my head to discover

That there was nothing in my belief.

Yet I wanted to look and see

That nobody stood at the back of me;

But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision

A shape which, somehow, there may be.’

So I went on softly from the glade,

And left her behind me throwing her shade,

As she were indeed an apparition—

My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

English author Thomas Hardy was fascinated with the ancient world that lay in cryptic form all around the Wessex area where he lived and set his novels.  He included many references to pagan history and belief in his accounts of the folkways of the area, and did himself experience the conflict between "reason" and the irrational intuitions and impulses of his being. Here, in the poem above, he seems to see his departed wife near a Druid stone ( a 5000 year old Sarsen stone lay in his garden) and to be reluctant to lose hold of the visionary "shape."

Week 8

The Echo Elf Answers             By THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)

How much shall I love her?

For life, or not long?

                “Not long.”

Alas! When forget her?

In years, or by June?

                “By June.”

And whom woo I after?

No one, or a throng?

                “A throng.”

Of these shall I wed one

Long hence, or quite soon?

                “Quite soon.”

And which will my bride be?

The right or the wrong?

                “The wrong.”

And my remedy – what kind?

Wealth-wove, or earth-hewn?

                “Earth-hewn.”

The Ruined Maid                    By THOMAS HARDY

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!

Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?

And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —

"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,

Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;

And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —

"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'

And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now

Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —

"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak

But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,

And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —

"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,

And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem

To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" — "True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.

— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,

And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —

"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,

Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.

Thomas Hardy is the author of Far From the Madding Crowd (one of 14 novels, three volumes of short stories, and over a thousand poems, among other writings).  The story is set in the southwest countryside of England, the county Dorset (which he calls Wessex, after a pre-Norman conquest kingdom of early England), near the ruins of Stonehenge and others of Roman antiquity, and features the rural people of that area, whose traditional lives he found profoundly interesting.  One of his recurrent themes is the tension between the traditional past and established faith and the modernizing world with its scientific developments and emphasis on evidence.  In the imaginative life of the poet, his art reflects the displacement and loss occasioned by historical developments, including Darwin's Origin of the Species and, later, the catastrophe of WWI. Hardy was fascinated by history, perhaps the more so as he lived through the modernizing period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the great event of WWI.

He's been accused of pessimism, of having a dark, fatalistic view of human prospects, and admitted that age did not dispose him to optimism.   This novel, despite dark currents, ends happily, and in the current film version by Thomas Vinterberg, as at least one critic has opined, much of what was unsettling in the novel and earlier film version, has been softened.  The heroine is Bathsheba Everdene, a powerful and beautiful young woman who inherits an estate and determines to run it herself. The pastoral form here belies the strange tensions and disconcerting passions that visit Hardy's characters.

Week 7

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971)

Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing    Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273)

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.   

In Praise of Self-Deprecation    by Wislawa Szymborska  (1923-2012)

The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.

Scruples are alien to the black panther.

Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.

The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.

The self-critical jackal does not exist.

The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly

live as they live and are glad of it.

The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos

but in other respects it is light.

There is nothing more animal-like

than a clear conscience

on the third planet of the Sun.

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,

the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,

I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,

I make something no non-being can hold.

(Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh)  

See  also "The Joy of Writing, " by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-poems-5_en.html

The Author of American Ornithology Sketches a Bird, Now Extinct   David Wagoner

When he walked through town, the wing-shot bird he'd hidden

Inside his coat began to cry like a baby,

High and plaintive and loud as the calls he'd heard

While hunting it in the woods, and goodwives stared

And scurried indoors to guard their own from harm.

And the innkeeper and the goodmen in the tavern

Asked him whether his child was sick, then laughed.

Slapped knees, and laughed as he unswaddled his prize,

His pride and burden: an ivory-billed woodpecker

As big as a crow, still wailing and squealing.

Upstairs, when he let it go in his workroom,

it fell silent at last. He told at dinner

How devoted masters of birds drawn from the life

Must gather their flocks around them with a rifle

And make them live forever inside books.

Later, he found his bedspread covered with plaster

And the bird clinging beside a hole in the wall

Clear through to already-splintered weatherboards

And the sky beyond. While he tied one of its legs

To a table leg, it started wailing again.

And went on wailing as if toward cypress groves

While the artist dew and tinted on fine vellum

Its red cockade, gray claws, and sepia eyes

From which a white edge flowed to the lame wing

Like light flying and ended there in blackness.

He drew and studied for days, eating and dreaming

Fitfully through the dancing and loud drumming

Of an ivory bill that refused pecans and beetles,

Chestnuts and sweet-sour fruit of magnolias,

Riddling his table, slashing his fingers, wailing.

He watched it die, he said, with great regret.

Good afternoon!

Today we will review the pieces assigned last week, including "The White Heron," and review the quizzes. I will return essay 2, graded.  Not a very recent story here (2014), but an ironic one, about a former teacher and his friend whose argument over the relative merits of prose and poetry grew murderous.  We cannot assume that literature makes us better people, I guess!

Famous Ballads:  http://poetry.about.com/od/poemtypes/a/Ballads.htm

Camille Paglia on "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness" in the 1960's: http://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/paglia_cults-1.pdf

Note:  If you have selected the piece for recitation you can earn extra credit points by giving it a practice run before the class and calling for feedback. *-*

Week 5

What is to give light must endure burning. – Victor Frankl

Welcome back to class.  I hope you are all doing well.  

     Today we pick up where we left off last week, reviewing the poem written about last week  ("The Summer Day"), Emily Dickinson's pieces, and on to ("nothing," by e.e.cummings) among others.  We will get to Hemingway's safari set piece, too.    For next week we'll cover Sarah Orne Jewett's "The White Heron." We will discuss  similarities and differences in these stories, but here I will indicate some of the similarities in theme that I have noted:

• A narrator/protagonist who feels himself in opposition to family and/or others and thus feels isolated or alone and vulnerable to some degree
• A narrator/protagonist who struggles to find and assert himself and in so many ways feel strong
• A narrator/protagonist who discovers where his powers lie and then exercises them
• A narrator/protagonist who considers the consequences of actions, and regards with sympathy and/or antipathy the weak, meek, and humble
• A narrator/protagonist who seeks understanding, even wisdom, through reflection, reading and writing and/or engagement with the natural world
• A narrator/protagonist who shows awareness of the social mask and who hides certain aspects of his character
• A narrator/protagonist who invites readers to see the challenges of growing up by relating key memories and experiences from that journey

The following free verse poem is by Walt Whitman, who served as a nurse during the American Civil War.  In it he sees beyond the immediate violent conflict between North and South in tender recognition of the "divine" humanity of all involved, and the healing inevitably to come.  Notice the long verse lines stretching out from among the shorter and providing an expansive, heightened sense of feeling:

Reconciliation

WORD over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world:
... For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.  Whitman's "Song of Myself," was the first poem published in the collection called "Leaves of Grass," an extended description of and tribute to America and to the expansive persona of the poet.  It is a very important proto-modernist piece that has received much attention from poets and scholars and been very influential thematically and stylistically. In fact, Whitman is considered the first great architect of free verse form.

A White Heron

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Homework:  in addition to composing an interpretative essay on a poetry and/or prose piece (#3 see directions below, due week 7 or 8), I give you two choices:  A short comparison of "Song of Myself," by Walt Whitman, and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," by Langston Hughes; or you may want you to consider Follain's  "Music of Spheres" (handout selection).  Write up four or five questions that the situation depicted in the poem raises (the character, setting, action, imagery, point of view, tone) and what answers or, if not "answers," responses might be made to each.  Research the title phrase as part of your study of the poem. You will be awarded homework points for this work.

Recitation reminder:   bring something to recite (not by memory) for class, which should be fun, and good practice!  Here is a link to student performance videos:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/theater/hamlet-student-instagram-videos.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Next week additional stories for those who want to read more:  Read the two stories "Misery" and "Joy" by the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov.  What constitutes the misery and joy in each?  What does Chekhov imply about human nature?

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/achekhov/bl-achek-misery.htm

http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1103/

At the following URL, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lewis-lapham/the-conquest-of-nature_b_2859691.html, is I think an excellent essay, by one well known, witty American writer on the human-animal relationship in historical and cultural perspective.  Animals, Lewis Lapham writes, elude our attempts to define them, even as we push so many to the brink in our "conquest" of the natural world.  An excerpt:

The eighteenth-century naturalists shared with Virgil the looking
to the animal kingdom for signs of good government. The Count of
Buffon, keeper of the royal botanical garden for King Louis XV,
recognized in 1767 the beaver as a master architect capable of
building important dams, but he was even more impressed by the
engineering of the beaver’s civil society, by “some
particular method of understanding one another, and of acting in
concert… However numerous the republic of beavers may be, peace
and good order are uniformly maintained in it.”

Buffon was accustomed, as were Virgil and Leonardo, not only to the
company of horses and bees but also to the sight and sound of ducks,
cows, chickens, pigs, turtles, goats, rabbits, hawks. They supplied
the bacon, the soup, and the eggs, but they also invited the question
asked by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836: “Who can guess… how
much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the
pantomime of brutes?”

How the Animal World Lost Its License to Teach

Not much if the brutes are nowhere to be found. Over the course of
the last two centuries, animals have become all but invisible in the
American scheme of things, drummed out of the society of their
myth-making companions, gone from the rural as well as the urban
landscape. John James Audubon in 1813 on the shore of the Ohio River
marveled at the slaughter of many thousands of wild pigeons by men
amassed in the hundreds, armed with guns, torches, and iron poles. In
1880, on a Sioux reservation in the Dakota Territory, Luther Standing
Bear could not eat of “the vile-smelling cattle”
substituted for “our own wild buffalo” that the white
people had been killing “as fast as possible.”

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Native American literature offers some interesting testimonials of tribal life and thought and the confrontation with European settlers.   Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala Sa) was a Native American writer who recorded her memories of Sioux life in South Dakota, including the influence of her mother, the natural world around them, the legends and rituals of her tribe, and her meeting with white missionaries.  In addition, "The Navaho Night Chant," a piece still performed today by the Navaho, offers a look into the way that poetry and chanting come together in a ritual of healing and transformation intended to return its participants to a renewed sense of vitality and wholeness.

                                                      Tintern Abbey (12th Century)

I have also a selection of poems I'd like to address, time permitting.  They will serve to underscore some of the narrative themes in the prose pieces we are reading, and provide review of the theme of the artist's relationship to art itself.   One is "Tintern Abbey," a romantic poem in blank verse by William Wordsworth:  http://www.rc.umd.edu/rchs/reader/tabbey.html   At the following link you may read background and see in photos the beauty of the abbey:  http://www.castlewales.com/tintern.html  Another is Alfred Lord Tennyson's rhymed narrative (ballad) of "The Lady of Shallot," based on the medieval tales of King Arthur. And yet others:  and John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale."  

 Essay #3, due week 7 or 8: Compose a 600-700 word (minimum length) essay that introduces the text(s) by title and author and proceeds to support a thesis point or claim about the text(s). You may address poetry and/or prose selections. If you have two or more selections, they must be addressed under a comprehensive thesis, the essay unified by the thesis, with each serving to illustrate, develop and support your thesis. Include some description of the formal structure of the poem and/or prose elements, for example, stanza form, line length and rhyme pattern, use of repetition or anaphora, use of narrative structure, setting, plot, character,  conspicuous sound devices, imagery, figurative elements (such as metaphor, simile, symbol, personification).  Remember, narrative always involves the perspective or point of view of the narrator (first person or third person typically, as well as plot, setting, character development, tone or mood, and central thematic concerns. Lyric poems may have little in the way of narrative or story, though they always have a speaker and the speaker provides perspective, along with whatever other voices may be presented in the poem.  Provide support and evidence for your claims in the form of textual summary and direct quotation, formatted in the MLA style, with line citations. Avoid using quotation unnecessarily or dropping quotations in without commentary. Integrate short quotations into the text with quotation marks and slashes to indicate line breaks. Quotations of 4 and more lines should be block formatted. Title your essay (do not use the poetry or prose story title in the essay title unless a subtitle is also present). Double‐space the lines.